The Tart with a Heart: Mercy Merrick

The New Magdalen opens with a very masculine setting far removed from society and convention: it is night-time in a French cottage on the frontier of a Franco-German war in 1870. The French have taken possession of the village, but a German counter-offensive is expected. Captain Arnault is reading despatches "by the light of a solitary tallow candle." In the kitchen of the cottage wounded soldiers lie on straw beds "under the care of a French surgeon and the English nurse attached to the ambulance." The surgeon comes in and requests that 'the English lady' might use the room while the Captain goes out, and the English nurse might keep her company. But under no circumstances must the women open the shutters of the single window and betray their position to the Germans. The surgeon calls into the kitchen to invite the women in, and we get the first view of our heroine:

"The nurse led the way - tall, lithe, and graceful - ...Pale and sad, her expression and her manner both eloquently suggestive of suppressed suffering and sorrow, there was an innate nobility in the carriage of the woman's head, an innate grandeur in the gaze of her large, grey eyes, and in the lines of her finely-proportioned face, which made her irresistibly striking and beautiful ..." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 1).

The second woman is "unusually pretty," "darker in complexion and smaller in stature." (Ibid.). She is timid and hesitant, "suffering from fatigue." While by no means unattractive, the English lady is very much left in the shadow of the magnificent nurse. Grace Roseberry introduces herself and asks for the nurse's name. She replies "Call me 'Mercy Merrick'" and the narrator rushes to question: "Had she given an assumed name? Was there some unhappy celebrity attached to her own name?" (The New Magdalen, Chapter 1). It is clear that Mercy is a woman with a past, but it is also worth noting that 'Mercy Merrick' is probably not her real name. She is already impersonating someone else.

Grace is on her way to England from Italy. Her mother died while they were living in Canada. Now, after her father's death, she has been left alone in the world and without means. Lady Janet Roy, a connection of his father's through marriage, "has consented to receive [Grace] as a companion and a reader." Since Grace's "education has been neglected" she cannot even become a governess: "I am absolutely dependent on this stranger who receives me for my father's sake."

After telling her own story, Grace presses Mercy to tell hers. Mercy becomes reluctant, defensive and very mysterious: "We never can be friends." "Don't tempt me to speak out ... you will regret it."  But of course she does speak out.

Mercy introduces the topic of prostitutes gently and in a round-about way: "have you ever read of your unhappy fellow-creatures (the starving outcasts of the population) whom Want has betrayed to Sin? ... Have you heard - when those starving and sinning fellow-creatures happen to be women - of Refuges established to protect and reclaim them?" When Grace nervously asks "What do you mean?" Mercy repeats: "Have you heard of the Refuges? Have you heard of the Women?" And then she tells Grace: "I was once one of those women." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 2)

In her biography of Collins, Catherine Peters calls Mercy Merrick one of "the soiled doves of his later fiction" (Peters, p298). The 'soiled dove' or, as Donald Thomas puts it in The Victorian Underworld (1998), "the figure of a Magdalene ripe for redemption" was popular and much debated: a woman who has fallen from 'the grace of God', lost her virtue and her innocence for no fault of her own or, at the most, because of a momentary moral lapse. William Holman Hunt's (1827-1900) famous painting The Awakening Conscience (1853) depicts one fallen woman coming to a realization about the sate of her life.

(Image from http://paintingdb.com/art/xl/7/6108.jpg)

This image of the 'soiled dove' was very much a cultural construct. Prostitution existed at all levels of society from high-class courtisans to street-walkers. Some of these women were wealthy enough to keep their own private households, some boarded in brothels, others had to borrow their clothes from their bawds to attract customers. Prostitution was seldom seen as a permanent way of life. Some women used it to subsidize their meagre earnings or to help them get through a rough patch in life. Others, undoubtedly, welcomed the independence and freedom offered by this occupation. A few women may even have been promiscuous by nature and quite liked the opportunity to have lots of sex. Prostitution in Victorian times was a vague concept and covered everything from kept mistresses to married women who took lovers and met them in 'houses of assignation' kept for the purpose. For a few, prostitution even offered a channel of upward social mobility. Catherine Walters, 'Skittles' secured herself the 8th Duke of Devonshire, Kate Cook got to call herself the Countess of Euston. Working as a prostitute generally was not an obstacle to marrying at any level of society.

With the Victorian interest in the conditions of the poor in society, they also studied the state of prostitution among the poor. Edwin Chadwick's Report . . . on an Enquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), William Acton's Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspect (1858) and Henry Mayhew's extensive London Labour and London Poor (1861-2) are all contemporary surveys. Prostitution was not seen as a separate vice, and it was not a crime.

Prostitution was a trade visible all over town from the fashionably promenading women accosting men in The Haymarket and Regent Street, to the brothels at the Ratcliffe Highway and the "soldiers' women" near the barracks and "sailors' women" near the docks. Every industrial town and manufacturing centre had its prostitutes. How does Mercy Merrick appear against this background?

Two things are worth considering here. First, the fallen woman with her virtue destroyed for ever and with no road back from perdition into the folds of polite and respectable society may well be a cultural construct and exist primarily in fiction and art. Secondly, The New Magdalen sold copies, but it did not cause a scandal. Collins's topic does not seem to have received many complaints, except from theatre critics. And as Peters has noted: "What might be read in private could not be acted in public, ..." (Peters, 339). It may be that today we expect the story of The New Magdalen to have been more sensational and outrageous, than it actually was at the time of its publication.

The New Magdalen may have been both behind and ahead of its time. It's publication at the beginning of the 1870s is in a juncture when attitudes towards prostitution and vice were changing significantly. In The Victorian Underworld (1998), Donald Thomas writes that the 1860s were "a decade of release from years of sombre austerity. Prostitution and flamboyant sexuality were a source of scandal but also an emblem of the new nightlife of the West End with its lamplit pleasure-gardens, assembly rooms, parks and casinos. The rebellion of a younger and more Bohemian generation of Victorians against its elders found expression in pleasures and provocation, a subversion of propriety through pornography and bawdry. .. By the 1880s, mid-century hedonism was checked." (Thomas, p7)

It is no coincidence that Crenmore Gardens in Chelsea closed in 1877 and the Argyll Rooms were closed in 1878. There were calls for banning of immoral French novels by Zola and Maupassant. The National Vigilance Association was established in 1885, Mrs Mary Jeffries, a keeper of several brothels for the well-to-do, was brought to trial the same year. The age of consent was finally raised to 16 (from 12) in 1885, after previous tries in 1881 and 1884 and a furious campaign spearheaded by the Pall Mall Gazette and W. S. Stead with his expose The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon.

 

Peters has called The New Magdalen "increasingly old-fashioned at a time when feminism was entering a new and positive phase" (Peters, p340), women, she suggests, no longer had to rely on deception and concealment as their only weapons in a male dominated society. At the same time, The New Magdalen anticipates the reaction against the 'gay' 1860s and a move to the straight-laced 1880s. Despite all its possible literary shortfalls, the social context of The New Magdalen is interesting. Peters writes that "Wilkie's Magdalen belonged to the jaded Victorian tradition of the woman 'fallen' through no fault of her own." (Peters, 339). I think this is dismissing Mercy Merrick too easily. There was no single 'Victorian tradition,' covering the whole of the 19th century. Mercy appeared at a time when attitudes to prostitution were changing.

In the opening chapters of The New Magdalen, the narrative prepares the way in a somewhat laboured fashion for Mercy's crime. Grace Roseberry has never met Lady Janet, her letter of introduction to this benefactress is in a letter-case she has shown to Mercy. Grace's education has been so neglected that Mercy can take her place without causing raised eye-brows. Both women have spent time in Canada around Port Logan. When Grace Roseberry opens the fatal shutter revealing their position to the Germans, she is promptly struck down by a German mortar. With Grace lying apparently dead at her feet, the temptation is presented to Mercy Merrick: "She might be Grace Roseberry if she dared!" (The New Magdalen, Chapter 4). Mercy does not jump at the chance. Instead she agonizes over this chance to win respectability and a social position under an assumed name. In the end, her transformation into Grace Roseberry happens effortlessly, almost without thinking. Before the Germans enter the cottage, she picks up Grace's cloak to cover her own nurse's uniform. With the Germans, in comes Horace Holmcroft, a war correspondent, who can get Mercy a pass through the German lines. Horace fills in the form: "You know what German discipline is by this time. What is your name?" "Grace Roseberry," she said. The words were hardly out of her mouth before she would have given everything she possessed in the world to recall them."

The narrative has almost bent over backwards to impress upon us that Mercy Merrick is not a scheming fraudster, but a fundamentally good woman craving after respectability and simply unable to resist a temptation. As Mercy travels away with ever more distant calls of "Pass the English Lady" at German checkpoints, Doctor Wetzel brings Grace Roseberry back to life. The only indication of her identity is a handkerchief with the name 'Mercy Merrick' embroidered on it (The New Magdalen, Chapter 5). The story of The New Magdalen has been primed for sensation.

The Drama of the Fallen Woman - Wilkie Collins's The New Magdalen

The New Magdalen (1873) by Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) is a story of identity-theft and battle with a bad conscience, complicated by social etiquette and tremors of strong emotion. It has been criticized as Wilkie Collins's most polemical book with a mission and has remained one of his more obscure works. It belongs to the latter period of his career when, it is often argued, his creative genius had runs it course and been replaced by an enthusiasm to lecture on social ills - this time on the miserable lot of the 'fallen woman' and the hypocrisy of the polite society.

The novel was first published serialized in Temple Bar, running from October 1872 to July 1873, and then by Bentley in two volumes on 20 May 1873. Reports about its success are contradictory. It was a success when first serialized (Peter Ackroyd. Wilkie Collins, 2012, p149), but did not sell well in Bentley's first edition (Catherine Peters. The King of Inventors, 1991, p340). Sales in the US, however were "enormous" (Peters, 1991, p345). Mudie's Circulating Library demanded that 'Magdalen,' the name for a reformed prostitute should be removed from the title before the book's publication in two volumes. Collins refused. Mudie's complaint may have dampened the UK sales of the novel, or it may have increased them.

(Image 1889 Chatto & Windus yellowback from http://www.wilkie-collins.info/books_newmag.htm)

Collins wrote The New Magdalen as much for the stage as for the page. Bentley's two-volume publication came out the day after the theatrical version of The New Magdalen opened in the Olympic theatre on 19 May, 1873. It was one Collins's most successful plays and ran for nineteen weeks in the Olympic and toured the country for years. It was also staged on Broadway, opening 10 November 1873 (several pirated versions had preceded this) while Collins was on a reading tour in America. According to the Times, the audience was much affected and "The sobbing in different parts of the house was painfully audible." The play was sensational. But it was not universally applauded. "An outraged lady wrote in the Daily Graphic": "The author of the New Magdalen has opened a recruiting office for prostitutes, and has made a direct attack on virtue and honesty.  ... A play so utterly vicious, so shamefully profligate in its teaching, has never before been produced at a New York theatre." (Robert P. Ashley "Wilkie Collins and the American Theatre" in Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 8, Nr 4, March 1954, p250).

The theatrical quality of the novel is clear from the start: it is divided into two 'scenes,' both of them opening with 'preambles' listing the time, the place and the 'persons' involved in the action. The settings are very limited; the first five chapters making up 'Scene 1' all take place within the four walls of a cottage on the frontier of a Franco-German war in the autumn of 1870. 'Scene 2' is limited to the various rooms of Lady Janet Roy's Maplethorpe House. At the opening of this section, the dining room is described very much as a stage setting in the present tense:

"[It] is famous among artists and other persons of taste for the carved wood-work, of Italian origin, which covers the walls on three sides. On the fourth side, ... a conservatory, forming an entrance to the room, through a winter garden of rare plants and flowers. On your right hand, as you stand fronting the conservatory, the monotony of the panelled wall is relieved by a quaintly-patterned door of old inlaid wood, leading to the library, ... A corresponding door on the left hand gives access to the billiard-room, to the smoking-room next to it, and to a smaller hall commanding one of the secondary entrances to the building. On the left side also is the ample fire-place ..." (The New Magdalen, Scene 2, Chapter 6)

The many doors in this setting provide ample opportunities for making dramatic entrances and exits. The action is made up of dialogue between characters, usually as a series of meetings between pairs of characters in the various rooms. There is also a dramatic opportunity for characters to peer in through open doorways and then withdraw, indicating their presence as eavesdroppers. On stage this may be necessary, but on a page, this bobbing in and out of doorways comes across as unintentionally comical (The New Magdalen, chapters 15 and 17, where Grace Roseberry stalks around Maplethorpe House).

Collins's biographer Catherine Peters notes that both Miss or Mrs? (1871) and The New Magdalen "were written with dramatization in mind" and because of this "Both suffer from this literary economy. Wilkie's practiced ingenuity in handling a complicated story and his impersonations of differing points of view, his great strengths were jettisoned." (Peters, 1991, p337)

I would argue that the limited setting and abundance of dialogue are appropriate for the method Collins has chosen to deal with his topic: The New Magdalen is about the internal struggle of one woman, Mercy Merrick, to make a choice: to either hang on to her assumed identity and gain a social position or to resume her true identity and redeem her soul. The closed setting within Maplethorpe House reflects the protagonist's claustrophobic internal situation. As the plot develops she finds herself in one emotional cul-de-sac after another, trashing desperately within the confines of her own conscience. The numerous dialogues echo Mercy's inner debates about what she should do. In this way, the setting and the narrative approach serve the central theme of the novel.

In Mercy Merrick "Wilkie created a vehicle for a clever actress: several triumphed in the part on stage. In the novel the character seems hollow and platitudinous. The potentially interesting character of the elderly Lady Janet,  .... though plausible on stage , is unbelievable to a reader, who has time to think about her reactions." (Peters, 1991, p338).

Whoever took on the part of Mercy Merrick, would get a chance to act her socks off. The amount weeping, hand-wringing and dramatic poses in majestic glory offered by the narrative would satisfy the most demanding diva. But there is room for other characters to strut their stuff, too. They get to swear, rant, weep (both leading men burst into tears in their turn) and despair.

The common complaint about sensation fiction is that it is all plot and no character. And admittedly, melodramatic posturing and overwhelming emotion not a plausible character make. However, in The New Magdalen all the character have some degree of roundness. It may not be anything a la Gustave Flaubert (it is quite interesting to compare Mercy Merrick to Emma Bovary and see what contrasting approaches and skills Collins and Flaubert display in their depiction of two female protagonists), but there is some life stirring within the bosoms of all main characters.

Grace Roseberry is the wronged, suffering victim but turns out to be not a very nice person. Horace Holmcroft is the initial love-interest, handsome hero who gallantly rescues Mercy Merrick. He is also small-minded and dim-witted and yet very, very respectable and honourable. Julian Gray is the fire-brand preacher favoured by women, Mercy's spiritual saviour (where Horace is her physical saviour). His character is an odd combination of fervent Christian faith and school-boy light-heartedness; and it goes through some development in the narrative where he begins as an actor enjoying his success in the pulpit, until a trip to the north and a glimpse of the rural poor cause him to abandon his glittering career as a preacher for missionary work.

Lady Janet Roy, like Peters indicates, is potentially the most interesting character in her dogged determination to shut her ears to the truth about Mercy Merrick. Peters may be right when she says that Lady Janet is "unbelievable to a reader, who has time to think about her reactions." But I think Peters is missing a point. More blatantly than other characters Lady Janet's reactions to Mercy Merrick serve the purpose of the novel's 'mission'. Lady Janet does not need to be a convincing character in order to pose a question to the reader: what would you do in her place? How easily do you shut your eyes to an unpalatable truth? Just like society averts its gaze from the 'fallen woman,' Lady Janet refuses to look at Mercy Merrick, once she knows the truth about her (The New Magdalen, chapter 28).

"Once More the Cool and Crafty Female Detective" - Mrs Paschal

Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) is attributed to William Stephens Hayward (1834-1870). His name did not appear on the original title page. Most cheap pot-boilers were published anonymously or 'by the authors of' earlier well-selling stories. Little is known of Hayward, but what is known indicates that he was a bit of a rogue (see Steve Holland's blog http://bearalley.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/william-stephens-hayward.html). Together with Samuel Bracebridge Hemyng, Hayward was associated with the popular "Anonyma" series of sexy and sensational stories. They all feature fearless heroines tackling compromising and dangerous situations.

 Revelations of a Lady Detective has ten cases told in a first-person narrative by Mrs Paschal, a female detective employed by the police. The title, promising revelations, is suggestive of naughty secrets and the cover image of the book (assuming that the 2013 reprint by the British Library retains the cover of the 1864 original) shows quite a saucy, pretty woman with a knowing expression, lifting the hem of her dress to show her petticoat and shapely ankles, with a lit cigarette in her other hand.

 

 Mrs Paschal's adventures are exciting, melodramatic and entertaining. The narratives flow well and there is plenty of action and violence. There are a few logical errors: in "Fifty Pounds Reward," Mrs Louisa Eskell is once called Laura, and later in the story one policeman mysteriously becomes "policemen." In "The Lost Diamonds" Karl Fulchöck's father is dead, but a couple of pages later he dutifully keeps sending him part of his salary. Each story wrings pretty much every last drop of suspense and emotion out of the scenes, sometimes to a ludicrous but amusing degree. It is not clear why the mysterious countess has to dress up as a man and wear "a hideous black mask" when she enters the basement in her own house.  It is also not clear why Mrs Paschal walks into the show at the gipsy fair only to see her suspect Lambrook perform with three rats. Hayward comes up with some terrific chapter titles, and often the action in the chapter is twisted suitably to provide substance to the title: "Eating Rats," "A Very Bad Woman," "Torture," and "Chained to the Wall" are my favourites.

There are many excellent scenes of melodrama; Mrs Paschal is several times spectacularly in danger of her life. In "The Mysterious Countess" she is lost in underground tunnels hiding from the countess: "What could I do? To attack her ladyship would, I thought, be the forerunner of instant death. It would be like running upon a sword, or firing a pistol in one's own mouth." In "The Secret Band," an evil mastermind Zini, the leader of an Italian secret society, amidst flashes of lightning and thunder, attempts to throw Mrs Paschal into the teeth of a gigantic water-mill: "If any one were by chance to fall within its compass, life would soon be extinct, and a mangled corpse would before long be floating down the river." And if her own life is not in danger, Mrs Paschal is witness to some sensational scenes. In "The Nun, the Will and the Abbess" she sees as young novice tortured by the evil abbess. In "Found Drowned" she chases a culprit trough a moonlit graveyard. In "Which is the Heir?" she watches a man kill a rat with his teeth and pretend to eat it: "the crunching of the bones was plainly audible." In "Mistaken Identity," she pretends "to be by no means shy" and plays the role of a wife of a French criminal turned detective in the company of a criminal gang in an ale house. And in "Stolen Letters" she takes a job as a letter-sorter at the General Post-Office ("For the sake of appearances two other women had been introduced at the same time." The men scowl at them "as if we intended to take the bread out of their mouths."), and she witnesses the culprit escape by means of "the tubes of the Pneumatic Company." In short, Mrs Pashcal is no shrinking violet and keeps getting herself into and out of tricky situations.

At the opening of the first story, Mrs Paschal arrives to see Colonel Warner "head of the Detective Department of the Metropolitan Police," he, according to Mrs Paschal, was the first police chief to employ female detectives following the example of "Fouchė, the great Frenchman" (Joseph Fouchė [1759-1820] was Minister of Police in France 1799-1810 and again in 1815).  Although most of her assignments are handed to her by the Colonel, Mrs Paschal is in the detective game to earn her living, and wherever she goes she keeps her ears open for potentially profitable cases. In "The Lost Diamonds" she is posting a letter at the General Post Office when she overhears two people mention that Duke of Rustenburgh has lost his diamonds: "I immediately began to think how I could turn the information to account." In "Found Drowned" she reads about the death of Laura Harwell in a newspaper: "I made up my mind to compete for the reward." Her eye is usually on the reward and almost all the stories mention where it will come from. Only some of the cases are official criminal cases, many of them are problems individuals bring to the Colonel, who then passes them to Mrs Paschal as matters of a private investigation. Many cases, like ""The Lost Diamonds" are "hushed up" and a deal negotiated ("The Nun, the Will and the Abbess", "Fifty Pound Reward") or the culprit is allowed to emigrate ("Who is the Heir?" and "Mistaken Identity"). Mrs Paschal is also aware that she that she is competing against other detectives. To recover Duke Rustenburgh's diamonds, "I was aware that in engaging in this matter I was undertaking a contest with the keenest wits and most fertile brains in the force." ("The Lost Diamonds"). She often takes a different course from her colleagues and solves the cases beating them in the detective game.

Mrs Paschal does not tell us much about herself. She is "verging on forty." She has worked as a barmaid ("Incognita"). Of her past, she says: "It is hardly necessary to refer to the circumstances which led me to embark on a career at once strange, exciting, and mysterious, but  I may say that my husband died suddenly, leaving me badly off." ("The Mysterious Countess") She enters households in the guise of a domestic servant, she "appeared of a mature age" ("The Nun, The Will, and the Abbess"), she talks of "old people like myself," and a young adventuress suggests she could be mistaken for her mother ("Incognita"). Mrs Paschal describes herself as "always happier in harness" ("Stolen Letters"), as "the cool and crafty female detective" ("Incognita") and says that "owing to frequent acquaintance with peril, I had become unusually hardened for a woman." ("The Secret Band"). She is smart, efficient, capable and unshaken by a corpse with a crushed head ("He could not bend down and kiss his wife's brow, for in its entire state it did not exist."), by an old woman falling down the stairs to her death or by seeing a man reduced by lightning to "a scathed mass of charred humanity" (all events in "The Secret Band"). Mrs Paschal is happy to bribe a housekeeper ("The Mysterious Countess"), steal paperwork from an abbess ("The Nun, The Will and the Abbess"), to enter the Pig and Whistle in the Seven Dials ("Mistaken Identity"), examine a drowned body ("Found Drowned")  and even abandon her "obnoxious" crinoline when chasing a criminal ("The Mysterious Countess"). There is nothing to stop this woman from pursuing her investigations.

Mrs Paschal is great fun, and a heroine of this calibre deserves equally formidable female adversaries. There is Lady Vervane, the eponymous "mysterous countess," who was once "on stage" and married "the notorious and imbecile nobleman" who soon died. Lady Vervane is beautiful, rich and resourceful, and "looked upon [Mrs Paschal] very much as a lady in the Southern States of America looks upon a slave." ("The Mysterious Countess"). There is also the evil and greedy abbess in "The Nun, the Will and the Abbess" and the pretty, avaricious Fanny Williams aka 'Incognita' who has Mrs Wareham's son in her clutches. Finally, we have the formidable Mrs Wilkinson, wife of the "keeper of a pork and butter shop" in "Fifty Pounds Reward." She corrupts poor, "muddled" Mrs Louisa Eskell into fraudulently spending her husband's money. This is an interesting story because it deals with a wayward and independent woman who speaks her mind. Mrs Wilkinson is large and loud, we get a long description of her gigantic body in most unflattering terms. It is worth quoting in full:

"She was enormously stout, and to such a size did her corpulence extend, that at the first glance the beholder imagined he was regarding a phenomenon who by some accident had escaped from the caravan in which she was carted from fair to fair, to be shown to the curious as a monstrous mass of humanity, whose adipose tissue had grown to a size altogether beyond reasonable or decent limits. In a house in which beetles abounded she would have been invaluable, for few of the poor insects could have effected their escape from the crushing tread of those huge feet, which more resembled the hoofs of an elephant or a gouty rhinoceros than the lower extremities of a woman. The bloated and swollen lumps of flesh which in her composition represented hands, were like patches of dough formed into half-quartern [sic] loaves before they were subjected to the heat of the oven. Her face might have been made by the amalgamation of two turnips and a pumpkin, with two pig's eyes deeply sunk in the fatty mass. Nature was to blame for having created such a montrosity, or if creation was unavoidable, for permitting it to cumber the earth, who surface groaned beneath the imposition." ("Fifty Pound Reward")

The narrative goes on to describe her voice and mannerisms with equal relish.                    

Mrs Wilkinson has been corrupted by her husband, who "was accustomed with gross indelicacy to speak before his wife as he would have done before his sporting friends, and the consequence was that her mind became vitiated, and her manners contaminated." Louisa Eskell falls under the spell of Mrs Wilkinson. John Eskell tries to control her: "I am the proper person to regulate such things, and to tell you who you shall know and who you shall not." When Louisa stamps her foot at her husband and protests: "a woman who submits to a man is little better than a fool," John Eskell threatens her: "If this sort of behaviour on your part continues, I shall send you home to your mother." And all this takes place under the chapter heading "A Very Bad Woman."

It is very difficult to know how to read "Fifty Pounds Reward." It is funny, quaint and just what we expect of the presumably horrendously prim and proper, misogynistic Victorians. When Mrs Paschal arrives to sort out the mess of the forged signature on Mr Eskell's cheque, she demonstrates her no-nonsense approach and marches to the Wilkinsons' shop and arrests Mrs Wilkinson in front of gaping customers as "an accomplice with one Louisa Eskell" for forgery. She is giving no consideration to poor Louisa's reputation informing the neighbourhood of her crime, even when she knows that Mr Eskell is quite happy to forgive his wife. Mrs Wilkinson "howled out her penitent prayers for forgiveness with a submission that was as servile as it was disgusting." The matter is resolved privately at the Eskells' house. Mrs Wilkinson pays John Eskell twenty pounds in compensation for making Louisa go on a shopping spree. Presumably Louisa also gets to keep her purchases. The Wilkinsons lose their reputation, have to sell their shop and end up "in a state of abject poverty." 

Mrs Paschal is a strong female character, but it would be misguided to read her adventures as in any way proto-feminist. They are, however, melodramatic in the best tradition of penny-dreadfuls. They are full of gruesome violence and Gothic scenes of mystery and terror. Their year of publication (1864) and the similar casebook format invite a comparison between Hayward's Mrs Paschal and Forrester's Miss Gladden. Mrs Paschal and her adventures are drawn with much stronger colours than Miss Gladden's. Miss Gladden's endeavours at detection are puny and pale when set alongside the thickly slapped-on melodrama and sensationalism of Mrs Paschal's investigative triumphs

"I Know Well That My Trade is Despised" - Miss Gladden, The Female Detective

Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective (1864) is a collection of seven separate cases with an introduction. All are told by a first person narrator (even if in the introduction she states that she will "tell the tales in what I believe is called the third person"). This case-book format follows a tradition of similar publications by male detectives both fictional and real. The Recollections of a Policeman by "Waters" appeared in 1852; Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer by William Russell (not a policeman) in 1856. The earliest of them all, Richmond, or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Officer was published in 1827. By the time Andrew Forrester hit on this formula in 1863/4 it was an old hat. He produced The Revelations of a Private Detective in 1863 and Secret Service, or, Recollections of a City Detective in 1864, both before The Female Detective, as well as The Private Detective in 1868.

Andrew Forrester was a pseudonym of James Redding Ware (1832-1909) [In Mike Ashley's introduction to The Female Detective this discovery is attributed to Kate Summerscale.). Ware wrote stories and possibly edited the weekly magazine Grave and Gay, where most of them appeared. It is evident that some the stories featured in The Female Detective were published before Miss Gladden was created, including "A Child Found Dead: Murder or No Murder," which appeared in 1862 under the name J. Ware (hence the connection between the man and his pseudonym) as a pamphlet and with no mention of Miss Gladden.

This story "A Child Found Dead" is little more than a re-telling of the known facts relating to the famous Road House murder case of June 1860. Similarly, "The Unraveled Mystery" outlines a hypothetical solution to the 1857 Waterloo Carpet-Bag Mystery, which was never solved by the police. There is no room in these stories for Miss Gladden and on both occasions the narrative is handed to her by 'Doctor Y-,' a medical man who remains anonymous (detectives do not reveal their sources).

At first glance, the stories in The Female Detective are rubbish. They are predictable and read like pot-boilers, spewed out carelessly without much forethought or effort. Only three of the stories follow the course of criminal investigations by Miss Gladden or 'G' as she is known among her detective colleagues. The remaining four are shorter, anecdotal tales of clever crimes, the two based on true crimes suggesting only their hypothetical solutions.

These tales are not entirely without merit and interest, however. There are a couple of pleasingly melodramatic scenes and mildly sensational turns of events. Perversely, the best scenes for getting the reader to grip the edge of the seat are wasted and their potential thrown away unused. In "The Unknown Weapon," just as they have discovered a crucial, incriminating piece of evidence, Miss Gladden and a female detective colleague find themselves locked up in a burning house. There is plenty of scope for heroic action as they fight to save their lives. The narrative resolves this tense situation: "This tale is the story of the 'Unknown Weapon,' and therefore I cannot logically here go into any full explanation of our escape."

"Tenant for Life" introduces a marvelously melodramatic villain in Sir Nathaniel Shirley. He is a selfish, profligate, sensualist. When, armed with his own police officers, Sir Nathaniel comes to take everything away from the pure-hearted, beautiful Miss Shedleigh, we are on the brink of a sensational scene. Unfortunately, at this moment Miss Gladden decides to leave the room: "Then I left the room. What was said I never learnt." She only returns to the room after Sir Nathaniel has dropped dead.

The Lady Detective is clearly not interested in offering traditional melodramatic scenes of horror, suffering or romance. The narrative sets them up before our eyes and then shuts us out. There is always the possibility that Forrester just is not a very good writer. There is also the possibility that he is making a conscious choice. Instead of sensational thrills and shivers based on spine-tingling scenes of danger and villainy á la The Woman in White (1860) or Lady Audley's Secret (1862), Forrester is grasping for a specific kind of a cerebral and moral thrill: the science of detection and the ethical dilemmas it brings.

In her Introduction, Miss Gladden asks three important questions. It is part of her 'logical' style to ask questions and follow them with answers. She also likes to present numbered lists of items. First she asks "Who am I?" And she answers that it matters little, as long as we accept "that whatever may be the results of the practice of my profession in others, in me that profession has not led me towards hardheartedness." We have detective with a heart - capable of compassion and sound moral judgment. Then she asks, "For what reason do I write this book?" She writes in order to show that the profession of a detective "is so useful it should not be despised." Throughout the book Miss Gladden is painfully aware of the general dislike and distrust for the detective police: "I am quite aware that society looks upon the companionship of a spy as repulsive; but, nevertheless, we detectives are necessary, as scavengers are called for, and I therefore write this book to help show, by my experience, that the detective has some demand upon the gratitude of society." The same argument is repeated in "Tenant for Life" and "The Unknown Weapon." The Female Detective presents itself as an apologia for the detective police. Finally, Miss Gladden asks what will be the value of the record of her experiences. She hopes that it will show how successful detective work can be in exposing evil-doing and, what is much more interesting and important, "that there is much good to be found, even amongst criminals, and that it does not follow because a man breaks the law that he is therefore heartless."

Detectives are sensational. They spend their time dealing with low-life criminals, homicidal maniacs, fraudsters and thieves. What is worse, entering the homes of respectable people they bring an unwelcome whiff of this societal pestilence with them. They are experts in pulling skeletons out of the family closet. Detectives are "family-spies." Miss Gladden observes that "It had appeared as though the English detectives were in the habit of prying into private life, and as though no citizen were free from a system of spydom."

Women detectives are doubly sensational. Miss Gladden's friends think she is a dressmaker, her enemies think she is a prostitute. She hides her true profession. Detection, for so many reasons, is not lady-like. Forrester seeks to present the female detective as a sexy, sensational figure who is a consummate professional in her highly questionable field of expertise. There is a tension between the admiration for the detective's skills and a discomfort with these same skills of spying, deception and ferreting out secrets.

"I am aware that the female detective may be regarded with even more aversion that her brother in profession. But still it cannot be disproved that if there is a demand for men detectives there must also be one for female detective police spies. Criminals are both masculine and feminine - indeed my experience tells me that when a woman becomes a criminal she is far worse than the average of her male companions, and therefore it follows that the necessary detectives should be of both sexes."

At best, this argument by Miss Gladden sounds like a strike for gender equality and feminism. At least, it sounds like a plausible justification for the existence of The Female Detective. There are things, according to Miss Gladden, that female detectives can do better than male detectives. They "are enabled to educate our five senses to a higher pitch than are our male competitors." They have an element of surprise, with people unable to believe a woman can be a detective. In "The Unknown Weapon" the mind of a slow-witted local policeman, "could not grasp the idea of a police officer in petticoats." They can assume an occupation of a dressmaker or a milliner which gains them access into a house for a suitable period of time. There are fewer such male occupations. Miss Gladden observes that "it is the peculiar advantage of women detectives, and one which in many cases gives them an immeasurable value beyond that of their male friends, that they can get into house outside which the ordinary men-detective could barely stand without being suspected."

In The Female Detective Miss Gladden uses the latest forensic technology ('fluff' is sent to a "microscopic chemist" for analysis) and lectures us on the importance of boot prints for identifying culprits. She finds out when the rain started on the night of the murder to estimate the time of the crime. She uses official registers for births and marriages to track down people. She showcases all these professional tricks of the trade of detection. She also lies, pretends and misleads. This is all in a day of detective work: "as evil-doing is a kind of lie levelled at society, if it is to be conquered it must be met on the side of society, through its employees, by similar false action." She condones theft: "we police officers have sometimes to turn thieves - for the good of society of course."

The professionalism, the scientific approach to the detection of crime and the slight bending of the social, even legal, rules to achieve ultimate justice are all features we today recognize as belonging to detective heroes. The most controversial characteristic of the female detective, however, is her sense of justice. The job of the detective police, as Miss Gladden repeats several times, is to uphold the law and bring criminals to justice. But justice according to law is not always in accord with our sense of fairness and just desserts. This is the point Miss Gladden makes at the end of her introduction.

The Female Detective aims to be sensational and thrilling by using a woman detective with specialized knowledge and expertise in the technicalities of crime detection. It can also be argued that a female protagonist and narrator gives the author more scope to explore the moral dilemmas detective work creates. Compassion is one more thing female detectives do better than their male colleagues. In this way, a woman detective opens up new ground for the author to explore and a powerful way to engage his readers. Miss Gladden is placed in situations where the law pulls one way, her moral compass points the other way. "Tenant for Life" labours this point almost to death. It is the main theme in "The Judgment of Conscience," and it resurfaces in different forms elsewhere in the stories.

It is possible, even likely, that Forrester is a lousy writer churning out cheap tales of detection to earn a quick buck. Nevertheless, he has created an intriguing and engaging character: a woman detective who is independent, professional, even mercenary in the pursuit of her trade and at the same time struggling to reconcile the gap between the law she is paid to uphold and her natural sense of justice. Miss Gladden is a sensational heroine, even if the plots of her adventures are not.

The Mystery of the Vanishing Lady Detective

The female detective seems to appear in popular fiction before we encounter her in real life. Once the detective officer was established as a popular hero of sensational fiction by the 1860s, it was but a short step to add more spice into the story by dressing this officer in a petticoat.

In real life, from the 1850s onwards, there were women working as 'police matrons' at police stations to look after and search female suspects. They were usually police sergeants' wives. In 1883 the Metropolitan Police employed the first woman as a female visitor to keep an eye on female convicts on license and women under police supervision. In 1889 fourteen women were engaged to look after female prisoners at the police courts. In The Invention of Murder (2011) Judith Flanders writes: "two women were hired to look after female prisoners at police stations in 1883" (p. 298) (Her information clearly differs from that of the Open University website). The first female police officer worked in Portland, Oregon in 1905. In the UK it was only after WWI that women joined the police force as officers.

Women's Police Service of volunteers was started in 1914, and two years later women were employed as typists by the Metropolitan Police. When an official of the Met was asked by the journalists of women would ever serve as police constables, the official famously replied: "No, not even if the war lasts fifty years." In December 1918 plans were made for new "Metropolitan Women Police Patrols." (This information about the history of the police is from the Open University website and the website of the Metropolitan Police. For more information see also Police Detectives in History, 1750-1950. Ed by Clive Emsley and Haya Shpayer-Makov, 2006 ).

This is the official history of women police. But the obvious question is whether fiction reflects the reality more than we are aware of? There is an argument to be made that women were occasionally employed to assist in investigations on a freelance basis. Until 1884 detectives, and before them Bow Street runners, sold their services as thief-takers and unravellers of tangled skeins to anyone wanting to employ them. It would only make sense that there would be situations where a woman's assistance would come in handy.

British Library has very conveniently re-published the adventures of the two earliest known professional female detectives in fiction. Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective was published in May 1864. At its heels followed The Revelations of a Lady Detective (October 1864) attributed to William Stephens Hayward. Both books have first person narratives, the Female Detective is Miss Gladden and the Lady Detective is Mrs Paschal. They are consummate professionals and a pair of tough cookies. The two collections of stories give a good view into the roots of detective fiction. They stand in the confluence of three traditions: sensational, gothic melodrama and the spine-tingling reporting of real crime can be seen to give way to the equally sensational romance of the newly invented detective police with its scientific methods.

There were surely other detective heroines in addition to Miss Gladden and Mrs Paschal. Flanders mentions Ruth the Betrayer (1862-3) by Edward Ellis (The Invention of Murder, p. 298), and she makes a reference to women attached to a private inquiry office in Collins's Armadale (1866). In "The Lenton Croft Robberies" (1894) by Arthur Morrison, the detective says that "Of course there will be a female searcher at the Twyford police-station." There were also female detectives in stage plays (see The Invention of Murder, pp. 380-1). We know of a tradition of amateur detectives in sensation fiction (Marion Halcombe in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White in 1860 or, even much earlier, Susan Hopley in The Adventures of Susan Hopley by Catherine Crowe in 1841). By the 1890s there were plenty of female detectives fiction: Dorcas Dene, Detective by George M. Sims (two series of stories in 1897 and 1898); Amelia Butterworth by Anna Katharine Green (3 novels: That Affair Next Door [1897], Lost Man's Lane [1898] and The Circular Study [1900]); Loveday Brooke by C. L. Pirkis (1894). Where are the lady sleuths of the 1870s and 1880s?

In his introduction to The Revelations of a Lady Detective, Mike Ashley mentions Mr Bazalgette's Agent by Leonard Merrick in 1888 and, in the US, "The Lady Detective" by Harlan P. Halsey in his dime-novels, possibly in 1880. Are there more?

Margaret Kinsman is surely right to say that there is a whole hidden history of female detectives in the 19th century. They appear so special to us, because we only know of a handful of women detectives from that period. (Kinsman spoke at a panel discussion on the female detective at the British Library 8.3.2013.)

In her book about female detectives in fiction, Kathleen G. Klein argues about Miss Gladden and Mrs Paschal that "These characters are anomalies" - they have no precedents, and no followers (Klein. The Woman Detective: Gender & Genre, 2005, p. 29). "Certainly, the lack of additional similar characters and the absence of further British female private detectives until the 1890s diminishes the status of these precursors through silence and omission." (Ibid.)

Are Miss G and Mrs P oddities and mere gimmicks to attract readers, or are they part of a lost tradition of Victorian female private eyes? Can you solve the mystery of the vanishing lady detective?

Flaubert's writing is thrilling

The secret of the sensational power of Madame Bovary is Flaubert's superb writing. I said at the beginning that I was not interested in his quality of writing, his pernickety insistence of finding just the right word or his celebrated position as a towering figure in the development of the modern novel. I did not care if it took him four years to write Madame Bovary and sometimes several days to write a single sentence. But quite frankly, I was wrong. Good writing is thrilling. Although Madame Bovary is a 'sensation novel' because of its melodramatic story of adultery, financial collapse and suicide, what makes it truly sensational is the way this story is presented from a point of view integral to the story and its characters.

In her Beginner's Guide to French Literature (2011), Carol Clerk highlights two techniques Flaubert uses in his realist narrative: free indirect speech and characters' point of view at looking at the world around them.

To reel us in, Flaubert's narrative shows us characters act, talk and think. It is left to the reader to figure out the internal life of the characters and their motivations. This gives the narrative a hook: the actions, words and thoughts of the characters become clues for us to piece the whole characters together. This is both engaging and rewarding, it fires up the imagination. It demonstrates superbly the golden rule of good writing: 'show, don't tell.'

Part of this method of leaving the reader to draw her own conclusions is the apparent lack of judgment in the narrative. The narrator does not express an opinion about the events. Flaubert's probably most famous quote comes from one of his letters to Louise Colet: "An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere." The narrator passing judgment would be too much like God showing his hand.

Emma is contradictory, she dotes on Berthe and pushes her away; she tries to feel something for Charles, she loathes him; she wants to be loved by Rodolphe and she decided to be a good wife; she dabbles with religion then rejects it. Her behaviour is illogical, her emotions are messy and sometimes contradictory. This is a risky strategy for an author to adopt: a fictional character should have continuity and her actions should have an internal logic. Otherwise the reader will struggle to believe and the character will have no depth, no sense of being real. Flaubert manages to do the very opposite. Emma's erratic emotional states, her toing-and-froing in her marriage, her failed attempts at piety and virtue, all add up to build a portrait of a young woman in turmoil. She comes across as a character with a shallow nature and hidden depths.

Madame Bovary is sensational because it makes readers understand and accept the roots of Emma's adultery and profligacy. The narrative works hard to show us the world and life from Emma's point of view. We understand her motivations, we see her as a victim of her own imagination and we do not judge her morals. We may think her silly, provincial, selfish, but we do not think her unnaturally wicked or evil. She is, above all, natural - acting according to her own nature.

There is no simple message or moral to be gleaned from Madame Bovary. This is why it has stood the test of time and is still good reading today. But nevertheless, it is still commenting on its own time and society.

 Many have interpreted Emma Bovary as a model of a middle-class woman of the nineteenth-century: bound with the ties of social norms to home and motherhood, and above all lethally bored. She can be seen as a proto-feminist character pursuing her own dream and chafing against the constraints of society. It can also be argued that Madame Bovary gives expression to Flaubert's own frustrations with the middle-class society and his dislike of the high bourgeoisie of the mid-19th-century France. God may not be so invisible in his universe after all.

Arsenic

Emma pretends that she wanted to kill the rats that kept her from sleeping." (Part III, Chapter 8). She asks Justin to give her the key to Homais's laboratory. Together they climb the stairs.

In the nineteenth-century arsenic was not only used as rat-poison, pesticide and in fly-papers and sheep-dip. There was arsenic in paints, wallpapers, furniture, toys, artificial flowers and even cake decorations. Arsenic was used in dyes to produce a beautiful emerald green. Ladies (like Ms Florence Maybrick, convicted of poisoning her husband in 1889) soaked arsenical fly-paper to get a face-wash. Arsenic was good for the skin and produced a rosy-glow (by stimulating the blood vessels under the skin). Arsenical soaps and lotions were also available in shops. The only danger for avid use was that you hair might fall off, but that just made arsenic a good hair-remover, too. During the Maybrick trial a local chemist testified that Mr James Maybrick together with other gentlemen would line-up daily at his shop to take their arsenic-laced tonic as a 'pick-me-up.' It was a stimulant with, so men believed, aphrodisiac properties. Arsenic was also given to horses to work them, to make their coats glossy and to make them run faster. For a full and entertaining history of arsenic in the Victorian period, read James C. Wharton's The Arsenic Century (OUP, 2010).

Arsenic is colourless, odourless and tasteless. It is a white powder and cannot be detected without chemicals tests. It was therefore thought to be the choice weapon of poisoners, particularly unhappily married or abandoned women. In the 1840s there were two famous cases of poisoning by arsenic in France: Marie Lafarge and Euphėmie Lacoste were both ladies forced into marriages by poverty and family with men they did not much fancy. (Their stories are included in Mary S Hartman's Victorian Murderesses [Robson Books, 1977]). In the 1850s, there was a minor panic about arsenic in Britain. Although statistics do not seem to support the idea of a poisoning epidemic, the media made a bid deal out of arsenic. Like Julie Flanders writes in The Invention of Murder (Harper Press, 2011): "Once newspapers picked up the idea, the ubiquity if arsenic made it terrifying; as they printed more (and more sensational) cases, it appeared that poisoning cases were on the rise." (Flanders, p. 232). In fact, in the ten years 1849 to 1858, according to Flanders, there were only seventeen trials for poisoning at the Old Bailey (p. 234). Arsenic was seen particularly as a woman's weapon. This makes sense, because its administration in food to an unsuspecting victim and its acquisition in fly-paper, rat poison or cosmetic products are both activities that fall within the feminine realm in the Victorian house. Also, administering arsenic does not require physical force, only cunning and daring and, often, desperation.

M. Homais is very careful with this lethal substance and horrified by the prospect of mixing it with domestic activities. When Justin brings him a pan for jam-making from the laboratory, Homais explodes in anger, while Emma stands by to witness the scene:

"Didn't you see anything in corner, on the left, on the third shelf? .... You saw a bottle of blue glass, sealed with yellow wax, that contains white powder, on which I have even written 'Dangerous!' And do you know what it is? Arsenic! And you go and touch it! You take a pan that was next to it!"

            "Next to it!" cried Madame Homais, clasping her hands. "Arsenic! You might have poisoned us all."

And the children began howling as if they already had frightful pains in their entrails." (Part III, Chapter 2)

Now, "Emma went straight to the third shelf - so well did her memory guide her -seized the blue jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand, withdrawing it full of a white powder, she began eating it." (Part III, Chapter 8). "Then she went home, suddenly calmed, and with something of the serenity of one who had performed a duty." (Ibid.) Emma's action is quick and impulsive. She executes her suicide without forethought and without giving any consideration to consequences. She stays true to her character. But she might have thought it through a little more and chosen a less painful way. Emma is perhaps not aware of the agonies in store for her: "Ah! it is but a little thing, death! ... I shall fall asleep and all will be over." (Part III, Chapter 8). On the other hand, she has chosen her poison well for a melodramatic, prolonged death scene. Taking an overdose of opium, readily available in most households like the Bovarys', would have been quick and quiet; she would have just fallen asleep.

Arsenic is a mineral hat exists naturally around us and in our bodies. Small doses of arsenic may even be good for us, it stimulates metabolism and may help growth. Excess arsenic is processed by the liver. Our individual arsenic tolerance can vary greatly, and we can increase that tolerance by taking small doses of the poison. In the 1850s Styrian peasants in the Alps astonished the medical world by their ability to withstand lethal doses of arsenic without any ill effects. This was down to their life-long habit of dosing themselves with it. (This information and the following details of arsenic poisoning are from The Elements of Murder by John Emsley [OUP, 2005]).

When too much arsenic enters the body and its natural mechanism can no longer cope the first reaction is for the body to empty the gut. Vomiting starts any time between fifteen minutes and several hours after arsenic has been swallowed. The victim feels thirsty, she finds it difficult to swallow and her mouth and throat feel sore.

"I'm thirsty; oh, so thirsty," Emma sighs. Then she tells Charles to open a window "I am choking." "She was seized with a sickness so sudden that she had hardly time to draw out her handkerchief from under her pillow." (Part III, Chapter 8) Flaubert's description of Emma's symptoms follows closely those of acute arsenic poisoning. The painful stomach sensitive to pressure, the pale, damp and cold skin, weak and erratic pulse are all indications of acute arsenic poisoning. Decorously Flaubert has left out the diarrhoea, which starts after twelve hours and goes on until the body is convulsed in empty spasms. Death comes usually in 12-36 hours, some have been known to linger up to four days. The doctors cannot save Emma. She receives last rites from M. Bournisien.

"Her chest soon began panting rapidly; the whole of her tongue protruded from her mouth; her eyes as they rolled, grew paler, like the two globes of al amp that is going out, so that one might have thought her already dead but for the fearful labouring of her ribs, shaken by violent breathing, as if the soul were struggling to free itself." (Part III, Chapter 8).

Emma's servant is kneeling before a crucifix, the priest is praying in Latin, her husband is kneeling by the bed, his arms outstretched, holding on to her hands. Even Homais "slightly bent his knees" while M. Canivet, the celebrated doctor "vaguely looked out at the Place." The death scene tableau is almost perfect in its conventional piety. Suddenly the scene is penetrated by the "raucous voice" of the blind, homeless beggar singing of love: "Maids in the warmth of a summer day / Dream of love and of love alway."

"Emma raised herself like a galvanised corpse, her hair undone, her eyes fixed, staring." She laughs "an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh." "The wind is strong this summer day, / Her petticoat has flown away." The song goes on and she falls dead with a final convulsion.

Emma has killed herself. In one sense her death seems selfish and unnecessary, a dramatic gesture of a wildly romantic young woman.  But at the moment she scoops up a handful of arsenic from the blue bottle and pushes it into her mouth, she is also desperate, lost and feeling that she has run out of options. She is not considering the impact of her actions, she just wants out. Her lovers have rejected her; all she has left is the hopelessly inadequate husband, a child she does not love and financial ruin. What does that final atrocious laugh mean? What memories, desires or regrets does the blind beggar's song recall?